LITMIR.BIZ

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she said. She tugged at something under the bed hard enough to make the whole thing jerk an inch away from the wall. “Ow!”

      “Are you all right?” he couldn’t help asking. That thump had really sounded like it hurt.

      “Oh, God,” the woman said. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.” Then she did the strangest thing. Instead of sliding out—and pushing that skirt high enough for him to check out what else she was wearing beneath it—she went further under the bed. He heard her oomphing and grunting as she crawled deeper and deeper, until her navy-pump-covered feet disappeared.

      He waited. Watched.

      Finally, he murmured, “Uh, I think you went the wrong way.”

      “Come back later, please. Your room’s not ready,” she said. Her voice was coarse and deep now; she sounded nothing at all the way she had when she’d been muttering about handcuffs, kink and perverts. Handcuffs and kink and perversions, oh, my.

      “I’m not going anywhere. The room is as ready as I want it to be, and I really don’t need you planting yourself in my bed to surprise me, okay?”

      “What?” she squealed. Thump. “Did you just...” Bang. “Ow!”

      He sighed heavily then dropped to a squat beside the bed. Reaching under, he grabbed her ankles and began pulling her toward him, out into the open.

      “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?”

      “I’m helping you out myself and then showing you to the door. Would you rather I call security and let them do it?”

      “Security? What? No, you don’t understand!”

      He ignored her and continued to pull, tugging until her small feet emerged from under the bedskirt. She kicked at him, so he yanked the spiky-heeled pumps off her feet and tossed them over his shoulders across the room. “Stop kicking me. You’re outta here, lady. Your seduction plan didn’t work, and I want you gone. So just stop fighting me and come out.”

      He resumed pulling, watching as shapely calves reappeared, followed by the soft crevices at the backs of her knees. That was one of his favorite spots on a woman’s body, and he steeled himself against wondering just how soft and silky this woman’s skin would be against his lips.

      “Plan? Wait, seduction?” She stopped kicking at him and began shimmying out on her own, something in his words finally getting through to her. Rand crawled out of her way and stood up, watching first her thighs emerge—oh, God in heaven, those thighs—and then a sliver of blue fabric that was so not covering anything it was supposed to be covering.

      Oh. Wait. Wrong sliver of blue fabric. No wonder the navy skirt wasn’t covering anything, it had apparently gotten caught on the underside of the bed and was now completely pulled up around her waist. Minuscule powder-blue panties did their best to cover the soft, round cheeks of her glorious ass, but their best wasn’t worth a damn.

      He gulped, feeling like he’d inhaled a mouthful of sawdust, as his mouth went dry with want. He had the wildest urge to nibble at the elastic pantyline, and slide his tongue along the tender, sensitive spot where shapely cheek met slender thigh. She had to kneel a little to get up, and practically rose onto all fours. His eyes rounded and some seriously erotic ideas burst into his brain, because those thin panties did very little to conceal the secret place between her legs. But he forced the images away. At another point in his life, he might have been interested in what this stranger was after. But this trip was all about somebody else.

      She tried tugging the skirt down, but it remained stuck around her waist. She forced herself the rest of the way out and rolled over, sitting on the floor beside the bed. He stared down at her, managing to jerk his attention off the lower half of her body, covered by nothing but stockings and panties, to look at a cloud of messy, light brown hair surrounding a heart-shaped face dominated by expressive, golden-brown eyes.

      Then the truth hit him. Those expressive, golden-brown eyes were expressing nothing but anger and contempt. And that heart-shaped face was one he knew. Oh, Christ, did he know that face.

      The room seemed to spin beneath his feet, and he groped for the back of a nearby chair to steady himself.

      Because it was Emily Crowder.

      Sweetly sexy little Emily, all grown up but still able to suck the breath out of his lungs and the intelligence right out of his brain.

      Em. The very woman he’d come to Chicago to find.

       2

      “EMILY.”

      “Rand McConnell, you conceited jackass,” she snapped, seething with anger she hadn’t realized she was capable of feeling. It choked her, enveloped her. She wrapped the rage around herself, well aware that she’d need it to keep her defenses high.

      Being angry wasn’t hard. The man’s ego was unbelievable. He really believed she was some groupie who’d been trying to seduce him by, what, wagging her butt up at him from the floor and begging him to climb on top of her and make her howl?

      He could. You know he could.

      That was beside the point.

      She leapt to her feet, too mad to feel any mortification about him catching her with her pants down. Er, well, with her skirt up. “You assumed I was lying in wait to take advantage of you?”

      “It’s you.”

      “Of course it’s me.”

      “What are you doing in my room?”

      “Not lying in wait to take advantage of you, that’s for sure! What on earth kind of women do you meet if they wait for you on all fours in hotel rooms?”

      A slow, wry grin spread across his face, that sexy grin of Randy’s that had graced magazines and cereal boxes. His amazing smile had made her dizzy with lust when she was a mere teenager and he not much more than that.

      That grin still elicited a reaction. Something inside her twisted and lurched—her heart, her sex, her stomach? All of the above?

      God, this was just how she’d felt the first time she’d seen him. Back when she’d been an innocent virgin, a good girl raised in a sheltered home who was looking to spread her wings and be a little bad.

      Rand had been a few years older, already so handsome he had girls following him everywhere. But, as she’d learned, he’d also come from a pretty sheltered, small-town background. They’d also had another sad connection, both of them having essentially lost a parent as a teenager, though not in the same way. Rand had lost his father to cancer—a true tragedy. Em had lost both her parents to prison on embezzlement convictions, which was more infuriating than tragic, as far as she was concerned. But still a loss for a young girl yanked from the only life she’d ever known. As their friendship had developed, they’d talked a lot about the paths their lives had taken after those losses...and the paths they had not.

      She shook her head hard, willing the sweeter memories of Rand away, forcing herself to focus on the bad ones.

      “I never meet women as interesting as you, believe me,” he said. And she did believe it, because the rat had the ability to make any woman believe whatever words came out of that beautiful face.

      Oh, God, why did he have to be so impossibly handsome? Why had his dark brown hair retained its luster, why hadn’t it started to go gray or, best of all, fallen out by the fistful? Why were his cheeks so sharply defined, and why was his jaw so rugged and his mouth so eminently sexy and kissable? Why was that body even more strong-looking, broad-shouldered and muscular than it had been when he’d been a college ballplayer just starting out? Why did those green eyes still take in so much more than she wanted to reveal?

      Why are you here, Rand?

      “You’re all grown up,” he said.

      “Seven

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